Two young boys made a gruesome discovery in the spillway of the Cherry Creek Reservoir 30 years ago today.

Vicki Carpenter, 24

But their find while fishing would have more meaning for one of them.

“We saw this thing floating around, and it looked pretty freaky,” Scott Buyer, then 14, told a reporter at the time. “It looked so realistic, just like a horror movie.”

Scott touched the arm to see if it was real and flesh came off.

The true significance of the discovery wouldn’t sink in until he learned the identity of the woman who was weighed down with two cinder blocks tied to a swing-set chain wrapped around her neck.

The partially clad, bloated body was that of Vicki Carpenter, a former neighbor and baby-sitter for Scott and his sister.

The boys found her April 2, 1985, two months after the 24-year-old model had been reported missing after failing to return home from a swimsuit-modeling show at Knick’s Restaurant and Saloon at 7800 E. Hampden Ave.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.